Saturday, May 10, 2003
Yep, I'm starting to get the hang of this blogging business, reading Need to Know and then linking to weird stuff that they've found as though it were my own.
What amuses me is that, based on the key at the bottom of the page, the world has been Rapture-ready since at least 1999. Yet strangely these guys are still here. Shouldn't someone start praying and ask God exactly what he's waiting for? Dramatic tension?
I did, in a spirit of interest, read the first of the Left Behind books. The first half is fairly competent fiction, exciting with a rather vanilla bunch of characters who were all Christians to some extent but just 'lost their way'. The second half, the theology bit, where the main character, who goes by the wonderful name of Rayford Steele, finds his faith again, while a reporter comes to realise that the new President of the UN happens to be the Antichrist, is just awful. Since this stuff is all foretold in prophecy, where's the drama?
And I've always found the whole Rapture element of Christianity rather distasteful to be honest. Only people who's faith in God is weak would have to invent concepts to make them feel better about themselves. If you really believed your God was the one true God and that good people go to Heaven when they die, would you need to invent a theological subset where non-believers have such an awful time, while 'believers' like yourself get to go to Heaven without dying?
What amuses me is that, based on the key at the bottom of the page, the world has been Rapture-ready since at least 1999. Yet strangely these guys are still here. Shouldn't someone start praying and ask God exactly what he's waiting for? Dramatic tension?
I did, in a spirit of interest, read the first of the Left Behind books. The first half is fairly competent fiction, exciting with a rather vanilla bunch of characters who were all Christians to some extent but just 'lost their way'. The second half, the theology bit, where the main character, who goes by the wonderful name of Rayford Steele, finds his faith again, while a reporter comes to realise that the new President of the UN happens to be the Antichrist, is just awful. Since this stuff is all foretold in prophecy, where's the drama?
And I've always found the whole Rapture element of Christianity rather distasteful to be honest. Only people who's faith in God is weak would have to invent concepts to make them feel better about themselves. If you really believed your God was the one true God and that good people go to Heaven when they die, would you need to invent a theological subset where non-believers have such an awful time, while 'believers' like yourself get to go to Heaven without dying?
